General Conference Is a Big Deal

Many that I know from my work as an advocate are really skeptical that everything institutional in the United Methodist Church is at best a show and at worst a cynical distribution of power and money to the elite with no thought to the mission or the saints (most local church people) of the Church. Our experience seeing the underside of the denomination gives my friends solid grounds to be skeptical.

I am inches away from their skepticism and would disregard General Conference myself for the same reasons except for one thing. I met a saint in 1984, my first General Conference as a lobbyist for church people in trouble with church leaders. His name is Richard Wright, then a superintendent from West Virginia. He encouraged me to keep on with what I was doing. But he suggested I consider working on more positive things like writing about better ways to do things, like being more supportive of those trying to do things right, like discussing responsibilities along with rights of pastors.

By the way, Rev. Wright is alive and well in retirement, a delegate from West Virginia told me.

Every General Conference since then, I have met some other remarkable people whose very existence keeps me from despair.

The big deal about General Conference is that there are a lot of those kinds of folks and they are meeting each other! Somehow, annual conferences elect not only the ambitious and cynical who know how to game the system but some real caring, insightful, capable people.

And I knew this General Conference was going to be big because I would have a chance to meet some of those kinds of people from outside the United States.